Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The Telepathy Freakout

When discussing the subject matter with neophytes or others unaccustomed to swimming in its waters, the boundaries of acceptable conversation vary enormously, and predicting individual reactions can be highly challenging. Mere mention of UFOs, for some, is verboten.  Many of you know this all too well. The awkward silence. The distant look. The pupil dilation. The conspicuous change of topic. Please, can we talk about something else? For GOD'S SAKE.  It's all in the eyes.

Was it something I said? If so, the conversation probably turned to telepathy.

Mind to mind.

Soul to soul.

The exchange.

The Universal Language.

Telepathy skeeves people out. Especially those who prefer their information filtered through however many sources it takes to maintain their existing paradigm. In other words, most people. It's acceptable to talk about the aunt who calls you on the phone when you think about her, or the oddly intuitive old soul neighbor who seems to magically appear when you're in a jam. Introduce a UFO encounter into that conversation and watch as your guest suddenly discovers they're late for an appointment.

Growing up in the 1960s and 70s, the subject of telepathy - commonly referred to as ESP, or, extrasensory perception - generated a great deal of public interest, including mine, that extended far beyond the aging spiritualists, tripping mystics, incipient New Agers and psychic spies rumored to serve The Cold War. Society today, beyond the insular warm fuzzies of The New Age Ghetto, seems more suspicious and fearful of psychic phenomena than it was in my childhood and early youth.

Few of my telepathic experiences translate into simple anecdotes, in part because psychic communication may or may not be expressed in linguistic terms. Often, it isn't. The simplest type of telepathic experience to describe in terms of interactions with cosmological intelligence involves what I call choreographed sightings, a form of contact in which a person is telepathically influenced to either go or look outside to witness a UFO.

The majority of my most strikingly unambiguous UFO sightings - a fireball, boomerang, black rectangle and several others - have been choreographed events.

Hear that? It's the shriek and cry of alien mind control!, programmed!, hybrid! belched from abduction porn and scary monster quarters, where wide-eyed residents, like producers of bad movies and worse television, perpetually write and rewrite the same script of human/alien interactions with Tarantino-esque S&M flair, hackneyed police procedural cliches, wise protagonists and gratuitously morbid plot points.

I can't win with that crowd, and don't care to.  My horror story is not some campfire yarn about a lock of hair liberated from the clutches of darkness. It is an epic tale of war, brutality and deprivation, generation after generation, playing out in the full light of day, every day, as told by sun-bleached bones pulverized into bricks and stacked high to form the regal facades of Church and State.  Nobody's buyin'.  The narrative - unless and until we decide to look at it, listen to it and write it differently - dumbly plods through the overgrown hedges and foggy swamps of unfounded and tragically misplaced optimism, impervious to pretty thoughts and disapproving jeers assembled over lifetimes of denial. I didn't like the ending.

The cooperative context of my experiences cannot be overstated: I explicitly requested to see as much as ^They were willing to show me, preferably in a fully conscious state. As a neophyte, I had no idea whether such engagement, from a practical standpoint, was even possible. I knew nothing - and I do mean nothing - about other people attempting communication with cosmological intelligences, as I had deliberately confined my UFO investigation, as much as possible, to examining photographs and reading eyewitness accounts of sightings. It would be another two years before I could say ufology without blushing and using air quotes.

The shock of reciprocal engagement, initially in the form of close proximity fly-by's at night while sitting in my semi-rural back yard, was mitigated by the beautifully precise, restrained and highly structured manner in which ^They demonstrated various aspects of the phenomena, providing only as much information as I could absorb and synthesize at any given time.

Events featuring telepathic connection were fairly frequent, often awe-inspiring and integral to the paradigm shift I embarked upon in 2008. ^They took great care to avoid freaking me out, lest my mind be blown. No small accomplishment, though it's a given some readers will believe ^They or I, jointly or separately, failed in that regard. I did go to the brink once or twice. Or so. Think you can do better when your model of reality collapses? I'll take that bet, and hope to lose, while harboring the assumption you haven't adequately contemplated the definition and implications of the concept, model of reality. I was glad - make that elated - to see my old model of reality go, but, even in the best of circumstances, navigating a paradigm shift is intense and draws on one's whole catalogue of life lessons, be it volumes or a thin brochure.

I am left to surmise that people who reflexively conclude I've been chipped! tend to view telepathy as an unnatural force.  It isn't.

Is there no place to enjoy my thoughts in privacy?
, asks the offended party.

Seriously?  Enjoy your thoughts?  I'll have what you're havin'.  But just a shot or two.

Even if we didn't live in The Age of Intellectual Property, free to contemplate freedom beneath an infinite canopy of surveillance cameras, the answer would still be no. Whether or not there is always someone or something eavesdropping on us, I have no way of knowing, but the ability to tune in  by the skilled telepath, human or otherwise, - and, to a lesser extent and in different fashion, the skilled technician-bureaucrat, most likely human - is, by my estimation, a constant.

Telepathic interactions other than the choreographed sighting are considerably more challenging to discuss publicly. Once telepathy migrates from theoretical to actual - having been validated through experiences which strongly appear to be structured, in part, for that specific reason - mediumship becomes difficult to casually and categorically dismiss as an exercise in self-indulgent psychowankery.

Good old discernment.  It works us to death, doesn't it? The word channeling is only slightly more prejudicial than it is broad, and I will readily admit to thinking of it skeptically and, often, cynically, as I do with all manner of public performance, including my own.

When The Source of my Contact experiences wishes to communicate directly with individuals, recruiting a channeler as a cipher-conduit impresses me as wholly unnecessary.  I find it a little sad, if sadly understandable, that people either (a.) think so highly, or, perhaps, lowly of themselves as to believe that would be their primary role in this life, or (b.) lacks confidence in their ability to receive or discern a direct message from a highly evolved cosmological entity.  Having said that, I've always been a teach a person how to fish type, so I can only ask of mediums, and those who consult them, that they not take my general wariness as a personal insult.

I often find myself relearning the value of thinking in terms of inclusive possibilities rather than exclusive probabilities, the former requiring humility (hence, the relearning), the latter not. Hey, neighbor. Have you heard The Good News? There's a needle in the haystack! Here, as everywhere, the delusional and fraudulent tempt me toward intolerance, but I am, at least, discriminating when it comes to throwing out the channel babies with the bathwater.

The question of whether dreamscape encounters are of a telepathic nature is probably best answered by degree. No one I know understands dreams or telepathy well enough to define the nature of whatever overlay, if any, they may share, but I've long had reasons (since childhood) for believing there exists some kind of relationship between them. Whatever neurological processes converge to form dreamscape experiences, this does not mean the dreamscape is always or solely comprised of neurological processes.  That's a different essay.


So, why would ^They cultivate an acute awareness of psychic phenomena among experiencers?  Theories, as always, abound.

Might popular awareness leading to the eventual acceptance of telepathy as a scientifically valid and natural phenomenon may pose an intrinsic threat to the dominant socioeconomic global paradigm (you know, the one killing the planet)?  Humanity's self-exploitation - our cannibalism - is driven by secrecy in the service of social advantage. You may recognize this force by its other name, politics. Nothing noble there, even if you put an exo- in front of it. Telepathy undermines individual and collective secrecy. For the citizen whose State relies on vaults of secrets and lies for its very existence, direct knowledge - as opposed to the official variety, which isn't knowledge at all - is the ultimate sedition.

Skating on the outer limits of speculation, I wonder if perhaps development of humankind's psychic intelligence has been impeded by social and/or environmental factors, which may partially account for our consistently poor-to-nonexistent judgment in critical matters affecting the health and well-being of planetary life. Nuclear energy springs to mind, as does the enterprise of permanent war and the ecocidal pyramid scheme of turbocapitalism that spawned and sustains humanity's obscenely wasteful resource-dependent consumer culture. These, of course, are all different faces of the same menace.  It appears  we are advanced enough to build and ride a bicycle, but not so bright as to avoid pedaling over a cliff.

Whatever ^Their motivations, it would not be absurd to entertain the rather mundane proposition that grownup civilizations possess grownup powers of Consciousness including telepathy. If so, what may be thought of as advanced lessons in telepathy to contactee-experiencers could be interpreted as entirely consistent with a familial or communal relationship between us and ^Them.

Based on my own experiences, my operating assumption is those who are willing to actively cultivate their own perceptual and analytical skills have prospective allies up there capable of providing, and willing to provide, assistance to those ends.

And, yes, it is amazing.


5 comments:

C.J. said...

I believe the actor Dan Aykroyd had an experience that could fall into the category of Choreographed Events. It is funny how the subject of UFOs is so taboo. While most people's eyes just glaze over as they tune the conversation out, some people will actually get angry about the topic. Interesting how it can stir up so much emotion...

Mike Clelland! said...

~ Arvin wrote:
They demonstrated various aspects of the phenomena, providing only as much information as I could absorb and synthesize at any given time. ... They took great care to avoid freaking me out, lest my mind be blown.

~ My reply:
You and me both, brother.

-

Also - You write cryptically about receiving telepathic communication. But at the same time you speak very cautiously about channeling. Here's my question to you (and it isn't really a yes or no thing), are YOU channeling?

Arvin Hill said...

@CJ: The totality of my UFO encounters strongly suggests a majority sightings involving unambiguous or low-ambiguity craft and plasma intelligence are choreographed events.

People who get angry at the mention of UFOs - whether skeptics or experiencers or whatever - are all coming from the same emotional hell of feeling powerless and afraid.

They're also narcissistic, largely ignorant of human nature, and, by extension, oblivious to the power structures and social conditioning which dictate the most significant material aspects of the individual and collective human experience. This is all part of the same basket, but that last part, in terms of engagement, may be significant.

* * * * *

@Mike: Am I channeling?

Challenging question. It would probably be imprudent to answer without first knowing your definition of channeling.

I've never invoked any kind of external intelligence, which I don't know is possible with The Intelligence on the other end of my experiences. But I do know invocation isn't necessary for the purpose of engagement. Our neural networks are alive - constantly generating, transmitting and receiving all kinds of information for which we often lack even the simplest conscious awareness. If I'm a channeler, everyone's a channeler.

The knowledge that matters most, I believe, is experiential, so the value of any information - be it channeled or synthesized or plucked from an email - corresponds with its utility as a driving force toward accruing experiences useful for self-cultivation.

The ostensibly channeled texts sourced to cosmological intelligences that circulate in New Age quarters via viral emails and assorted dispatches are not ones I find convincing. However slick the best ones are, a close examination invariably reveals telltale clues highly suggestive of human composition. Not just annoying misspellings or grammatical errors, but conceptual ones. I do not want to be associated with that. So when I have something to say, I say it. If people would rather hear it from the Vice Commander of the Galactic Federation, all I can give 'em is a shrug.

However ambivalent I may be about channeling, my caution stems not from the process, but, rather, its capacity for exploitation, sabotage, dependency and misinterpretation by deeply flawed human beings. That's true of a lot of things, though.

C.J. said...

You nailed it when you mentioned fear. I think that's why people shy away from it, for the most part. If they really think about it, it makes them feel very small and out of control. Thus, fear.

Arvin Hill said...

It's easy to understand why people would be afraid. Acclimating to the subject matter can take a long time and require a great deal of efort, and some people never adapt because, for them, Fear is this enigma's appeal.

And, just to be clear, for people who don't know otherwise: I'm not saying the prospect of direct personal Contact offers nothing worth fearing; only that it is a calculated risk. Since the calculation was mine to make, I went into it without reservation. It was well worth the effort and stress, but it wasn't generally what I would call fun.

I just wanted to see (a.) whether interactivity could or would occur, and, if so:, (b.) how ^They would communicate, and, (c.) what ^They would choose to communicate.

Even when my experiences get strange - and they still do periodically - the closest they got to frightful is when the eerie quiet of a humid summer night is shattered by the piercing buzz of a dutiful air conditioner. I can't count the times I've been startled that way.